2016. So far....

2016 has been another great year working closely with a range of companies in the plane, train and automobile (and a bit of boat...) industries. We've even been giving some advice to a company building a flying car.....

Dan started Light Black Design, just over 7 years ago, with the aim of helping the boat world reduce costs and improve efficiency by passing on some of the advances in composite technologies that the car world had made. That knowledge has now allowed Light Black Design to help almost all possible modes of transport. And the best thing about being involved in so many different projects is that each and every one does something differently and allows us to pass on that information to others.

Starting with Planes.....
Most of 2016 has been with Acro Aircraft Seating again. This year we have been continuing the work we started with the all composite, economy Series 6 seat backs, working closely with the material suppliers and part manufacturers to help them develop the designs to suit the materials and processes. This will be the first all composite seatback that really is cost effective for economy aircraft seats whilst still giving the weight savings possible from using carbon fibre composites, which is so important in the commercial aircraft seating industry.

This seat has been shown all over the world and goes into full production with a world leading airline in the coming months.

We have also been work with Acro on their future Premium Economy seat, Series 7. Once again, this is a seat that has been shown all over the world and has had some amazing reviews. Dan has been helping them with materials and processes as well looking at some of the smaller details in the overall setup of the seat.

To trains.....
Working with Acro lead us to some work with Transcal. Their CEO, Robert Aitken, questioned why Train seats are not as comfortable as Plane seats, especially when one considers the price paid for train tickets compared to the low cost plane tickets that the Acro seats seen on.

With this in mind, and working closely with Factory Design in London, Dan helped engineer this revolutionary Rail seat, that was unveiled at InnoTrans earlier this year.

To Cars....
Having finished working with Ben Ainslie's Americas Cup team in February (that's the boat bit...) Dan was extremely lucky to been given the opportunity to work with an Italian road car company, helping them develop some structural, composite parts that could form the basis of future cars of their production lines.

Alongside this ongoing project, Dan has also been working with a UK manufacturer on an all composite, driver-less taxi for the US markets. Working closely with a world-class team, Dan has generated the conceptual geometry for the chassis and all the BIW (B?) that could form the basis of the prototype vehicles that will be built in the coming months.

As proud as we are of both these projects, we obviously cannot say who we are working with but as soon as the projects go public we will of course show as much as we can.

And finally, to somewhere between cars and planes....
Dan has been contacted by a new European company to help them with some production materials and processing choices for their highly advanced carbon fibre chassis/cockpit. The engineering of this car/plane is being run by an old friend, who Dan worked with at McLaren Automotive.

Although our part in this amazing project is only in its very earliest stages, and there is not much more we can say at the moment, we really look forward to having this chance to work on something that really is out of this world.

2015. What a year....

2015 was an extremely busy year for Light Black Design.....

We have been very lucky to be carrying on the work we have been doing with Acro Aircraft Seating, helping them develop their next few economy class, lightweight seating. All this work culminates in the first showing of their new Series 6 seats at the Hamburg AirCraft Interiors Expo on April 5th to 7th. Until then, we obviously cant show you these seats but we will of course put a load on our Twitter feed once the press get to see them....

These final release of the seats is an evolution of the seats that were on display last year. 

Since that show, the NPD team (New Products Development) has been formed and now has around 12 engineers working in it, looking at not only this release of the Series 6 seats, but Series 7 & 8 too. Light Black Designs role in the office is to work with all the NPD group and composite suppliers, to engineer these seats to be the most comfortable, reliable, lightweight, low costs seats on the market. And those requirements, in that order, are straight from the mouth of Chris Brady, who is the MD of Acro and whose general amazing ethos is the reason that they are on of the most successful companies in the country. Well done Chris!

Once again, we will keep you up-to-date on these seats as an when they are released, and we wish all at Acro the best of luck for the show.

And for the rest of the week, Dan was lucky enough to have been asked to fill a few gaps in the Design Team at Land Rover BAR, working mainly on their second test boat, T2 Whilst always intended as a temporary role for Dan, whilst they sort out the full numbers in the design office, it was a fantastic team to be part for 11 months and we wish them every success in the future. And if you look at the results from this last weekend in Oman, it looks like they are well on track.

What was fantastic to see was Sir Ben's vision, looking outside of the usual people involved in the Americas cup, and bringing in some of the top people, materials and processes from the other advanced composite industries, such as Motorsport and getting them all to work together to make his team even better. This is always a brave thing to do, and other teams have made it clear they think the best thing to do is only with people who have done the Americas cup. Safe, but maybe limits your possibilities. So, Land Rover BAR now have a fantastic team of people, from a wide range of backgrounds, who will all be able to provide valuable input, based on other projects they have worked on that may just open up some avenues that other teams may not see. Good luck Ben.

So, back to 2016 and we are looking forward to continuing our work with Acro Aircraft Seating as well some other automotive projects, both high and low volume, that seem to be all lining themselves very nicely indeed. And in-between all these projects we Dan will be carrying on the development work of the Flattens, in particular the latest FL015 spec Flatten, for one design boats such as the J70, M20, M24 etc which have all been looking for a horizontal, furling batten that works like the flattens do. Following on from some amazing results in the J70 worlds and Europeans in 2015 where Boats.com used some development FL015's to great success, this is something we cant wait to get back onto. 



And whilst it was fantastic to be other peoples offices for most of 2015, the view from our little office isn't so bad after-all.